The Truth About Video Editing Software in Hollywood – 7 Year Update!

5 THINGS - Simplifying Film, TV, and Media Technology

Exactly what video editing software does Hollywood use for film and television? I have an update to our most popular episode from seven long years ago, and today we’ll reexamine the landscape and see how Hollywood has adapted since then, including a change from the big three solutions.

The original “The Truth About Video Editing Software” in 2017 got some attention.

Many years ago, I dissected the video editing landscape here in Hollywood and told you what most editors were using. But most importantly, why? Now, before we look at what’s changed, I do encourage you to check out the original The Truth About Video Editing Software in Hollywood from 2017, to see how we got to where we were…then.

Since 2017, desktop software has improved. New tools have now entered the market, and creating content on your phone now includes editing. There are just so many options out there, so I’ve reached out to various folks in the industry, both on the business and creative side. Some have been under FrieNDA (which is my favorite type of agreement) and some have been under the cloak of night in empty parking garages here in Southern California. But all have granular insight into the industry and where we are today.

1. Avid Media Composer

When we last left Avid in 2017, they were the undisputed software choice for film and TV picture editing here in Hollywood. Media Composer, their flagship product, had multiple versions for beginners, professionals, and enterprise users. And as a side note, they dominated the post-audio market with Pro Tools. Avid even had their own branded hardware.

Now you’ve got to consider the singularly unique place Avid was during 2017.

Media Composer looked…well, let’s face it, dated. It was designed using then-decades-old iconography and design, which was legacy from the days of helping film editors transition from analog editing to digital. Because most film and TV post-production pipelines within post facilities relied on Avid-centric workflows, updating the interface and workflows to attract new users and to grow Avid’s business heavily risked alienating existing users. As my grandmother used to say, “You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.”

However, in 2019, Avid completed a new look for Media Composer, although they eventually acquiesced and offered the “Classic” look several years later. Avid has also since introduced UME, their new “Universal Media Engine,” which replaces AMA and thus successfully dodges another unfortunate product name (*cough* Avid ISIS *cough*).

After 30 years, Media Composer and Pro Tools finally have direct interoperability.

And after 30 years, Avid finally made the round trip workflow from Avid Media Composer to Avid Pro Tools and back easy with a direct session import and export. No AAFs needed!

When the pandemic hit, the industry had to quickly adapt while working remotely, and while Avid had existing products for these distributed teams, they were either expensive or better suited for broadcast news, or they were still in beta like Avid’s cloud editing product, Edit on Demand, which was both expensive and in beta.

Despite these product roadblocks for remote work, most productions stuck with good old-fashioned Media Composer. Work-from-home editors remoted into existing Avid workstations back at their facilities, which maintained environment familiarity and access to the usual shared storage. Avid rental facilities set up racks of systems to keep post-production moving. Alternative editing solutions to Media Composer didn’t offer huge cost savings for film and TV productions, whether it be doing everything in the cloud or by switching to another editing software platform.

But by and large, if you cut with Media Composer, you stuck with Media Composer.

A review of the Academy Award nominees and winners from 2017 until now also shows that a majority of the nominees and winners were cut with Avid Media Composer. At a business level, Avid reported 15,000 to 20,000 Media Composer Cloud subscriptions in late 2017 and into early 2018.

Now, that may seem low. I mean, how can you dominate one industry with only 20,000 seats of software? But keep in mind, seven years ago, not every Media Composer user had a cloud subscription. Many users still had legacy licenses, which were not yet counted within cloud subscriptions. Now, if we fast forward to late 2023, Avid reported over 150,000 cloud subscriptions for Media Composer prior to their acquisition by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

It’s pretty clear Avid remains the standard for film and TV editing in 2024. Now, what will happen now that private equity owns Avid? Well, that’s a subject for another video.

2. Adobe Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro has been part of the Adobe Creative Cloud package since its inception, giving Adobe a significant advantage in gaining users due to the existing widespread use of other Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I mean, Premiere is right there to download and use! In 2017, Adobe also had an industry misstep to continue to capitalize on when Final Cut Pro Classic was killed off years prior. Facilities and editors had to find a new video editing solution that was ready to go and could handle workflows for film and television. And let’s face it. Final Cut Pro X wasn’t ready at the time. Now you could have moved to Media Composer, but many saw this as a nonstarter. I mean, they had already opted to go with Final Cut Pro Classic over Media Composer years prior anyway, and that decision wasn’t going to change. At the time, that really only left Premiere Pro.

And so in 2017, Premiere Pro was second, albeit distant, as a choice for film and TV editing. Since 2017, however, Adobe has continued to enhance its Productions workflow, which provides Premiere Pro editors with a collaborative experience similar to Avid’s Bin and Project Sharing, which is a mainstay in collaborative film and TV post-production. And this additional feature did gain Adobe some high-profile film and TV projects. The first Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate, and David Fincher’s projects like Gone Girl and his HBO mini-series Mindhunter were all edited with Premiere Pro, as was last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now, if we look at Hollywood-adjacent productions like those at the Sundance Film Festival, we’ve seen Premiere Pro being used on a greater number of films over the years, and it’s now accounting for over half of all projects showcased at the festival. And even more projects use Adobe if you include other Adobe tools like Frame.io.

However, the fact remains that Premiere Pro in Hollywood has remained more unique than the standard. The general consensus is that Premiere Pro is still easily the main alternative to Avid Media Composer for film and TV work. But is that a bad thing? I mean, it’s important to remember that the market is relatively small compared to other, more lucrative media-rich markets, plus social media, where video content is produced at an exponentially faster rate than film and television. In fact, recent studies show that a majority of young Americans aspire to be social media influencers over most any other career. Film and TV are no longer the only media vehicles for visibility, let alone creative work. So for Adobe, why continue to focus heavily on a market that is no longer the main avenue that many creatives aspire to work in?

I think I’d rather take the bag of money from a faster-growing market over a case study and my logo in the credits of the film. Adobe doesn’t release much in the way of metrics for app usage. However, Adobe did report that it had approximately 12 million Creative Cloud subscriptions in 2017, and the subscriber count has grown to over 33 million in 2023. This year, however, Adobe has faced many challenges, including poor communication about how their AI is trained and emerging legal issues with the DOJ and FTC over early subscription termination fees and a complex cancellation process. As of now, it’s unclear how this will affect Adobe moving forward.

3. Apple Final Cut Pro

Those of us that were at the 2011 NAB SuperMeet knew we were seeing something special during Apple’s surprise unveiling of Final Cut Pro X, but little did we know, the fallout from this single announcement would have permanent, continuous repercussions for Apple editing software in Hollywood. Now, the Final Cut Pro X launch missteps have been chronicled extensively elsewhere, so I don’t need to rehash them ad nauseum.

But I will mention a few key points as they’re important for context to understand where we are today.

Higher-profile film and TV post-production requires a solid tech stack and software interoperability. This includes multiple hardware components as well as a trained staff to maintain it. Often, complete turnkey systems for post-production are sold by what we call Systems Integrators or VARs (Value Added Resellers). Post facilities often buy from VARs because pricing is generally better, and the VAR can build, test, deploy, and support these solutions.

Putting the “value” in “Value Added Reseller”

Unlike Final Cut Pro Classic, Final Cut Pro X did not go through the usual sales channels. It was an App Store purchase. This meant that the VARs’ role was largely mitigated and thus professional adoption was slowed.

It would take Apple several years to get Final Cut Pro X to a level where it could be used in professional film and TV workflows. We had a perfect storm of factors that had most professional editors, and especially facilities, simply not interested in moving forward with Apple editing software. And as I said in 2017, it’s these hurdles that made Final Cut Pro X a distant third in Hollywood film and TV editing. And it hasn’t gotten any better.

In 2022, the editing community created a petition asking Apple to publicly stand by the use of Final Cut Pro for TV and film industries worldwide. Now, to their credit, Apple did respond, and they committed to the joint development of training and certification courses, plus creating an industry advisory panel and an increase in Hollywood-centric workshops for film and TV editors. So while Final Cut Pro X has matured to be a professional editing solution and has been used on a handful of high-profile projects, the window of opportunity to ascend or even eclipse the level of its predecessor has unfortunately closed. However, as a slight silver lining, Apple hardware was and still is a mainstay in the professional content creation industry, and I bet many of you have an iPhone instead of an Android.

4. Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve

When I last covered DaVinci Resolve, many of you predicted it would become Hollywood’s next “do all” tool. And you were…half right. Resolve has had significant updates since Blackmagic acquired it, including adding Fusion for VFX and Fairlight for post-audio, which creates a very comprehensive suite of tools. Resolve’s speed makes it excellent for transcoding, and in some specialized cases, Fusion can replace expensive legacy VFX systems.

But it’s Resolve’s color tools that have now become the industry standard for color grading. And it’s not just because of their intricate controls, affordability, and overall innovations, but because the existing color tool sets in Hollywood ten years ago were, let’s face it, lacking. Avid’s advanced color grading tool, Symphony, had very few feature updates at the time and required higher monthly costs. Lumetri, the Premiere Pro color tool, was also beginning to show its age following Adobe’s acquisition of SpeedGrade in 2011. Plus, the other color solutions on the market were either expensive or existed outside the video editing software that most creatives were familiar with, so there was a major deficit in accessible color tools, but not in creative video editing tools.

Avid and Adobe’s editorial tools had decades of nuanced development and were already affordable for most. Resolve’s video editing features were still evolving at the time. The flip side, however, is that even if Blackmagic did introduce revolutionary video editing tools within Resolve at the time, they still would have faced massive resistance from a Hollywood industry still wary of wholesale video editing changes following the failure of Final Cut Pro X to succeed. There simply wasn’t enough incentive for Hollywood to switch to Resolve for professional video editing.

But that’s not the full story. The free version of Resolve, or the one-time payment for Studio, is a no-brainer compared to continual, eternal paid subscriptions from other leaders like Adobe and Avid. Bundling the more powerful Resolve Studio with a Blackmagic camera purchase was also a fantastic marketing move. Resolve offers incredible value, especially for new editors, and it’s a well-established business tactic that getting buy-in from the younger, next generation of creatives is a fantastic way to boost sales down the road.

While the details on exact download numbers and usage are not publicized, in 2019, Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty did say that Resolve downloads topped 2 million, and I can’t see any reason why it still wouldn’t be growing. As an interesting side note, however, there’s a vast difference between the number of free users of Resolve and the number of paid users of Resolve Studio. The general consensus is that most professional film and TV creatives are going to need the features found in the paid Studio version, but most industry analysts estimate that only 5% or so of Resolve users actually pay for the Resolve Studio upgrade. So those professional creatives, at least those in Hollywood, are overwhelmingly using Resolve for color work and other side tasks, but they’re not using it as their primary video editor.

With Avid and Adobe taking the top spots as the creative editorial choices here in Hollywood, Resolve as a video editor faces steep competition, not unlike the smartphone market, with Apple and Android dominating the marketplace with no real challengers. So, however distant, that third place for video editing software in Hollywood that was previously occupied by Final Cut Pro can now easily be filled with the logo from Blackmagic Design. But like Adobe, this does beg the question: “Are the vanity bragging rights for Hollywood’s editors worth the windfall of cash to be found by capturing other markets?”

5. Everything Else

As is in life, there are no absolutes, and there will always be exceptions and outliers. Parasite won Best Picture in 2019, and it used Final Cut Pro Classic software that had been dead for eight years. The legendary Thelma Schoonmaker has used Lightworks for several of Scorsese’s movies, including Killers of the Flower Moon, which had ten Oscar nominations in 2023.

If anything, these two footnotes should reinforce that it’s not the tool, it’s the talent. Knowing the right tool makes you employable. Your talent is what keeps you employed. So what do you think we’ll see in the next seven years? Will predominantly mobile solutions like CapCut or open-source solutions make their way into the professional film and TV market? Or do you have a hot take on AI in Hollywood? I look forward to your thoughts.

Until the next episode, Learn more, do more. Thanks for watching.